Authors: Heather McAlendin
Tags: #Eternal Press, #Vampire Queen, #McAlendin, #paranormal, #vampire, #supernatural, #Killer Queen, #war, #thriller
The Hunted
Killer Queen
The Hunted
By
Heather McAlendin
Eternal Press
A division of Damnation Books, LLC.
P.O. Box 3931
Santa Rosa, CA 95402-9998
Killer Queen: The Hunted
by Heather McAlendin
Digital ISBN: 978-1-61572-383-6
Print ISBN: 978-1-61572-384-3
Cover art by: Dawné Dominique
Edited by: Alison O’Byrne
Copyedited by: Rose Vera Stepney
Copyright 2011 Heather McAlendin
Printed in the United States of America
Worldwide Electronic & Digital Rights
1st North American and UK Print Rights
All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced, scanned or distributed in any form, including digital and electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or by any information storage and retrieval system, without the prior written consent of the Publisher, except for brief quotes for use in reviews.
This book is a work of fiction. Characters, names, places and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously, and any resemblance to any actual persons, living or dead, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.
For Scott.
Thank you for believing in my work and my weird and wonderful mind.
Chapter One
I struggled against the hands and bonds that immobilized me. I felt paralyzed. There were flashes of light and fangs, so many sharp, white fangs. My flesh was shredded, blood draining from wounds that covered my arms, my legs and my throat.
“No!” I screamed. “Andrew, where are you? Why can’t I feel you? Why won’t you help me?”
Suddenly, the bonds released and I sprang forward, reaching out in front of me.
Nothing. There was nothing but cool air and the dark.
“A dream?” I panted. “This was all a dream?”
I ran my tongue over my exposed fangs and lips. It was a nervous habit I developed over the last few years. After a moment or two to quiet my mind, I reached out into the inky blackness and felt the darkness revealing the same feelings I had for the last six months: devastating loneliness.
Reaching up the wall, I felt for the light switch. I blinked quickly as the room flooded with flickering, florescent light.
I sat up in bed, alone; my long, silver hair fell like a curtain around my shoulders. I looked around the room at the blacked out windows and the sealed door. It was a barren, impersonal space excepting a small bed, a single pillow and a well-worn comforter I had stolen from a second hand shop not too far from where I was now living.
This was what my life had become. The life of a former Vampire Queen.
I glanced down at a small cooler that fit snugly under my bed. It was full of ice packs and blood bags.
“Marie.” I sighed as I remembered our first visit to the blood bank not so many months ago. “If not for you I’d have starved to death.”
Marie Saint Martin was a young, former nun with the gift of sight that I turned into a fledgling vampire. Although not without purpose, her human death and rebirth into the Vampire Clans left me unsettled and grieving. She was the kin of Andrew Saint Martin, the human host and consort I had chosen to become the next leader of the vampires and their first King.
I still refused to feed from any human who would not give themselves freely to me. It sickened me the way these new vampires would feed off anyone or anything.
I sat back and carefully lifted the bag of life-giving blood to my lips, revealed my fangs and drank deeply. I closed my eyes and sighed. Before now, my blood taking was an intimate process. I missed Andrew.
Andrew was home, leading the Vampire Clans and taking care of Marie until she became used to her new life as a fledgling.
I had a job to do and I had to keep that in context before I became maudlin and depressed about my past. My past had brought me to this unsettled present.
Hannah was my chosen one; my first blood according to the Vampire Code. In a jealous rage and filled with greed she chose to break the code, break the rules, and break my heart. Hannah stepped away from me and the opportunity to become Queen, to force her way into the human world and create her own half-blood, motley crew of vampires.
As former Queen, I was responsible for bringing her to justice and with that, ending her miserable life. In an odd twist of fate, I missed out on that justice myself but I had to seek out and end the lives of those Hannah had so wrongly created.
The only problem was I had no clue how many were out there or where they were hiding.
Chapter Two
Feeling suitably refreshed at dusk, I came out from my hiding place and wandered the streets seeking anyone who would lead me to Hannah’s remaining brood.
Mine was a lonely task and perhaps righteously so. I was amazed at what the modern world deemed a vampire to be. Modern movies portray us as evil doers; monsters who lust after the taste of human blood. In books, we are sexual deviants using blood to bring us to a frenzied orgasm. Humans choose to speak about us in hushed tones, comparing us to Satan or evil incarnate. There is so much fiction and so little truth to any of it.
Although we are ancient and we do indeed sustain our lives with blood, we are not murderers, thieves, or rapists. It was these and many other misconceptions about our race that I had tried to avoid for hundreds of years. It was the main reason the Ancient Ones created the Vampire Code. Within the code, the vampire race could exist with minimal human contact and we could remain, by all human standards, a myth. The code was a safety mechanism. Too much rogue contact between humans and vampires would sully the bloodline and the pure vampire race would no longer exist.
Now I had to rid the world of Hannah’s abominations and in doing so, protect the Vampire Clans and humanity before they meshed so closely together that both were in danger of extinction.
Centuries ago, a whole race of ancient vampires called the Toltecs bred themselves into extinction. I dreaded the same thing happening to my people in the twenty-first century.
“Look, it’s the Killer Vampire Queen.” A hushed, laughing voice mocked me from the shadows.
“No longer Queen,” another chided. “She took a human lover and made him King over our beloved.”
“Show yourselves.” I placed one hand on my thigh where I felt for the bejeweled dagger Queen Akita gave me before leaving my home so many months earlier. The blade was razor sharp and true. I had severed many vampire heads from their lifeless bodies by its machinations. The only true way to kill a vampire was to pierce its heart and remove the head from its body.
“You are all cowards!” I shrieked into the inky darkness. I could hear movement and breathing but I had yet to discover their hiding spot.
“Cowards?” a disembodied voice said. “You allowed a fledgling vampire to murder Hannah. You, who supposedly uphold the Vampire Code to the letter, funny how time changes things.”
I stopped and listened, my vampire blood churning with rage. The words and voice were vaguely familiar to me, like an echo in time.
“Drake?” I whispered. “No, it can’t be. You are dead, I watched you die.”
Once again I heard the familiar, low male voice chuckling.
“Sometimes the eyes, just as the heart, can be deceived,” he said.
Father Drake Von Brugel was an Ancient, older even than I or the Ancient Queen Akita. During the Christian crusades, he had been a formidable warrior of the cross. He travelled many continents on the Pope’s behalf to bring the sinful to the side of God. Father Drake knew no boundaries when it came to his faith or his merciless discipline and indoctrination of the soulless.
He was a brutal man. My mind flashed back to our first meeting; seemingly a lifetime ago. In fact, it was many lifetimes ago.
I was a warrior maiden on a quest to find adventure. I had been a trained healer and after I found my family brutally murdered by a warring faction, I set out to start a new life and leave my old life behind in the charred ruins of my tiny village.
It was during one of these sojourns that I came upon a dense thicket in the woods. Deep within the thicket was a clearing where I had noticed a gathering of armed men and horses. As silently as I could, I crept up on the group and sat unnoticed in the dense underbrush.
A very tall, well-built man in a long, black frock drew my gaze. His dark eyes glittered like diamonds in the midday sun and his hair was thick and black. He had a long scar on his cheek that ran from just under his left eye to his jaw. Instead of marring his complexion, it added to the authority and masculinity of the man. When he turned to face the group, I noticed the red and white emblem embroidered into his frock. He was a man of God, a priest!
I moved slowly to get out of line of sight when I heard a grunt. A man, thrown from behind the line of men and horses, fell to his knees in front of the towering priest.
“Do you accept the light of Christ in your heart? Do you release the demon within you to follow as his disciple?” Father Drake stared at the hooded man, prostrate before him.
“I have no God and you speak heresy Priest! I have seen what you and others have done in the name of your God.”
The man choked as he spoke. I could well imagine his throat was dry from breathing through the roughly sewn sack that covered his head. What had this priest and his followers done?
Suddenly the priest’s fist came down on the man’s shoulder and knocked him flat into the dirt.
“Quiet evil doer, your serpents tongue holds no power in the eyes of the Almighty!”
“I do not answer to you.”
The man let out a low grunt and quickly jumped to his feet. His actions startled the armed men surrounding him. Before anyone could move forward, he had a weapon in his hand, stolen from the warrior standing closest to him.
With one swift movement, the dagger flashed forward and Father Drake sank to his knees with one hand wrapped around the weapon embedded in his stomach.
“You will go to hell bastard dog!” The dying priest groaned. “I am ready to meet my God with a clear conscience.”
I remember clapping one hand over my mouth as I watched the blood pump from his gut. Father Drake’s men called out to him, then captured and beat to death the offender who murdered him.